


Don't Wait 'Til I Do Wrong

by Damalia (Achrya)



Series: VampireAU [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Drinking, Depression, Injury, M/M, Mild Gore, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 08:10:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6897847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Achrya/pseuds/Damalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marco is tired. Tired of the stares, the whispers, the pity, the weakness…tired of it all. But a hungry visitor to his bed one night might be just what he needs to escape. </p><p>Alt Title: Witches, Vampires, and Pie, Oh My</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Wait 'Til I Do Wrong

**Author's Note:**

> There's graphic injury, near death experiences, depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts in large amounts here. Be wary and protect your own mental health first. <3

How it happened was something of a cliche. It was summer, the AC was busted, and his mother had insisted earlier in the day that he open up a window before he baked in his room. He’d done it, mostly to indulge her, and hadn’t thought to shut it again before going to sleep. 

At first he thought he was dreaming. Something heavy was on his chest, pressing down with enough weight that it was near painful. He tried to push it away but found he couldn't move; it wasn't that he was being held down or his movements restricted but like he was paralyzed. He wanted to move, told his limbs to do so, but they refused to obey him.

Why-?

Even though he couldn't move his mind was completely aware and he could still feel everything, which just made it that much more surreal. Strands of something silky brushed over his face and hands touched his shoulders then his head was pushed to the side. Lips touched his neck and his heart leapt. He wanted to open his mouth or try to get away but he remained unable to do anything.

Cool damp air wafted over his skin as lips opened. There was blunt pressure and then two sharp points piercing his skin as lips formed a seal. It hurt for a second and then it was...something else. 

A tickle under his skin and then a shifting, like something was pulled out of him, and it was strange but not bad. Funny, he would have thought someone biting him to suck his blood would have been more painful or concerning. At least a little scary but he instead he felt...calm. 

A little sleepy, maybe, but mostly calm. No frantic confused thoughts, no tightness in his chest or rising panic...just quiet. 

He'd felt like this once before.

His fingers twitched. Someone groaned and the weight on his chest moved as the hands of him gripped tighter. He opened his eyes to the darkness of his bedroom and tried to turn his head. 

The person on top of him went rigid. The mouth on him vanished and then he was looking into startled golden brown eyes. 

“You're awake?” A beat, during which Marco just blinked, and then the man was jerking back, eyes widening in alarm.

Control returned to him all at once in the form of a full body pins and needles sensation washing over his skin and the ability to inhale deeply to fill his lungs. He was able to reach up for the man, who was trying to scrambled off of him, and caught on to an elbow.

“Wait.” Marco croaked out as he put his other hand to his neck. He could feel blood on his fingertips, but not much, and the area was tender when he pushed on it. “It’s fine. Vampire, right?”

He could practically feel the man’s surprise in the air. His head whipped to the left, towards the open window and it's gently moving curtains, then back towards Marco. The only light was coming from the window, barely enough to see by, but the man’s lips were parted and he could see teeth, pearly white with unnaturally sharp canines. Marco knew it should have been terrifying to be suddenly confronted with an actual monster in his bed, but he found himself thinking instead of how nice it had been. 

“Did you...want to finish?” He asked when the vampire said nothing. “I don't mind.”

The vampire’s expression melted into one of disbelief. “Um, what?”

Marco hadn’t always believed in monsters and magic. He hadn’t ever been one of ‘those’ kids, strange and obsessed with things that went bump in the night. Never had he been convinced there must have been more out there or, really, all that interested in the supernatural at all. He was logical and believed in what he could see and touch.

It was a source of contention with his very Catholic parents.

It was only after losing his arm that he’d realized there was more going on out there. He should have died deep in a swamp in a blistering jungle but he hadn’t. He’d come close; a fire fight had broken out and explosions, some sort of shrapnel filled homemade bombs he’d learn later, had taken out most of his unit. One well, or poorly rather, aimed bombed had stolen the vision from one eye and blown his arm to hell, leaving a useless limb so ruined it was barely recognizable hanging from his body.

If he'd been in his right mind he probably would have been sick. Just the memory of it, ripped flesh and gaping wounds and shattered bone piercing his skin, made his stomach churn.

He’d been dazed, bleeding, sinking deep into the brackish sandy waters of the swamp, ears buzzing like his head was full of bugs. There had been a strange sense of calm to the moment. Surrounded by the dead, his friends and teammates, about to be swallowed up and, no doubt, never found for his family to even bury, and he hadn’t been able to care. 

No pain, no worry, no anger. Not even a need to fight or get back up. He’d felt at peace. 

But death hadn't seen fit to take him by the hand that day. Or maybe it had only to have him wrenched out of its grasp. He still remembered Bertholdt, one of the people in his squad he was closest too,wading through the filthy water as clearly as he had fourteen months ago. Green eyes turned as black as tar, hair rippling even though Marco hadn't felt a breeze move the stagnate jungle air in days, and the air around him seeming to take on a presence all its own, stained deep green and roiling around him. 

He remembered being touched and how painfully cold Bertholdt’s hands had been. Like chunks of ice gripping him, burning him with their chill, forcibly dragging him out of the dreamlike state he was in with pain. First the cold burn and then electricity and fire crashing into him, clawing into his veins and replacing his blood, turning him inside out with hurt. Gone was the calm acceptance of death and in its place was pain like he'd never known; every nerve had been alight, tortured, and he'd felt like he was being torn apart tiny bit by bit. 

He knew now that, in a way, that had been exactly the case.

He remembered screaming, thrashing, biting his tongue so deeply that he'd choked on his own blood before finally passing out. He'd woken up in a tent, back in the main camp, with some cuts and bruises that had yet to heal and a perfectly functional arm. The only thing that indicated he'd done more than, say, tumbled down a hill was his eye. It was cloudy, a diseased looking creamy yellow where it had once been white and the iris was a brown like dried blood. 

No doctor could explain why it looked like that or why, in spite of it seeming to be fine, he couldn't see out of it. 

Not even Bertholdt, who'd been sitting at his bedside when he woke up, could answer that question. He'd suggested that healing Marco had taken so much energy it has sort of burned his eye out, that Marco had been a little bit dead so the eye had stayed that way, or that maybe he'd just been too tapped out to fix everything the right way. Magic, especially life and death magics, was hard to wield and focus properly without years of work and Bertholdt was far from completely trained. 

He'd handled their enemies, healed two people before Marco, both far less damaged but blessedly unconscious so Bertholdt was spared having the ‘magic is real, monsters exist, and if you tell anyone I'll have to kill you’ conversation with them, but he insisted fixing Marco had been harder than all of that combined. 

At first he'd been appreciative. He was alive and more or less whole, how could be complain?

But then he'd been discharged and sent home and things had started to unravel. Bertholdt seemed to vanish without so much as a phone call or email. The reality of being blind in one eye started to set in and, worse than that, the reality of people staring. 

It was always the same. First shock and disgust then pity. Always pity. From strangers it wasn't so bad, they just knew he was a guy with a gross eye he couldn't see out of, but friends and family were worse. 

People who'd known him his whole life were suddenly falling over themselves trying to cater to him, treating him like an invalid, and walking on eggshells. 

As if losing an eye was the end of the world. As if he couldn't hear them whispering about what a tragedy it was. As if he didn't notice them wincing when they accidently looked him in the eye.

An eyepatch sort of helped. 

Work was hard to find and only got harder when, after a few months home, his arm started acting up. It would go numb and limb, hanging there useless and beyond his control. Other times it would hurt like...well, like it had been blown to pieces without the comforting veil of shock to keep the pain at bay. The first time it happened he'd been sure the magic was being undone somehow, that he was dying all over again, that Death was coming to collect what it had been denied. 

There were other, more ‘normal’ things, that made life hard. The nightmares. He died in that jungle night after night, in pain and screaming, and no amount of prescribed pills seemed to help. The panic attacks, sometimes caused by a familiar face or sound and sometimes by nothing at all. He couldn't manage to keep his shit together under the best of circumstances and when things weren't good, when he was having a rough day or people were staring extra hard or he'd heard his mother praying for him the night before or he had to have yet another person ask how he could be so unhappy when it was a miracle he'd come home more or less unhurt so why didn't he just try harder to be less sad all the time? Couldn't he see how he was upsetting his poor parents? Why was he so ungrateful, and a million other questions he asked himself nightly but has no answer to...

Well no one wanted to employ someone who sometimes forgot where they were or fell apart over raised voices and loud noises on ‘bad days’.

His dreams changed seemingly overnight to become full of monsters that wanted to tear him apart and often did. Sometimes the nightmares blended, drowning in a swamp while monsters with human skin tore the flesh from his body and ate him alive. He become preoccupied, worried that all the things Bertholdt had told him existed were out there, lurking just out of sight. He couldn’t explain how it started or why, he’d been fine for months, and then suddenly his fear was there, always there, and he couldn’t escape it. 

He saw monsters behind every corner, shadows cast by nothing that seemed to move all their own, until just trying to leave the house made his heart race and head swim. Between his anxiety and the things he was sure he was seeing (or not sure. He knew, logically, that it was in his head but he couldn’t do anything to stop the fear) and the fact everyone seemed to think he was losing his mind he couldn't bare to leave the house to even go to therapy anymore. 

Couldn't leave the house, couldn't sleep, couldn't talk to anyone… He was trapped with no idea of what to do. 

And that was life. Just day after day of waking up, haunting his parents’ house, going through the motions of eating and drinking when he remembered to do it, and then sobbing his way through nightmares. 

He started wishing that Bertholdt hadn't wasted the energy to save him. What was he now anyway, a headcase who flinched away from his own mother and might have been seeing the supernatural or might have lost his mind? (Some days he leaned heavily towards the latter.) He was a waste of a ‘miracle’. 

He started to long for that peaceful feeling he'd had before Bertholdt had healed him. He didn't think he’d had a moment of peace since but he wanted it. Wanted to just close his eyes and have there be nothing but blackness awaiting him. Wanted to feel nothing. He supposed, if he really thought about it, he wished Bertholdt had just left him to die.

\---

Jean managed to shift so he was sitting on the edge of the man’s bed before the human spoke again. 

“I said you can finish.” The man said as the hand he'd been using to feel his neck dropped to his side. He sighed deeply and turned a single tired eye back onto Jean. The other was covered by a patch. “It's not a problem.”

Jean wasn't the oldest vampire around, though he was the oldest in his little ‘family’ but not once in his eighty years had a human ever offered themselves up after being bitten. Even vampire groupies, back when the vampire craze had been at its peak and picking up some starry eyed person to nibble at had been easy got loud and scared the minute he let them go.

Jean didn't blame them. He remembered being bitten and drained, how he'd gone deaf and been unable to move or think and how fucking terrified he'd been. He couldn’t begin to fathom why someone would want to experience that eerie 'trapped in your body for what feels like forever’ moment again.    
That was why he prefered feeding from the sleeping, to spare them that feeling. Not that he was some kind of saint or anything but there was just no reason to fuck people up if he could avoid it.

That he'd never had anyone wake up during a feeding before went without saying Jean was good at keeping people under, wrapping them up in some sweet dreams where having someone suck on their neck was appreciated was as easy as bre- well, no, not breathing. But still pretty fucking easy. It had come more naturally to him than any of the other vampire stuff at least. 

But then lots of things about this guy were weird. For one he tasted good and that was...human blood was okay and, moreover, it was the best as far as energy per amount went (followed closely by fairy blood. Werewolves and other vampires were the worst and tasted rancid on top of being, essentially, empty calories.) but given the choice Jean would always prefer a donut and some coffee. This guy wasn't quite donut level but Jean was willing to say he was the best living thing he'd ever tasted. 

It had been salty sweetness on his tongue, thick and intoxicating, and warm tingling down his throat. He'd been able to taste power and  _ life  _ in every swallow, and he'd felt it bringing warmth to his body. 

He'd never had anything like it. 

Then there was the smell. He was only in this room because he'd been walking by on his way to meeting Armin at the 24-hour diner the blond liked so much and he'd gotten a whiff of what he'd thought was another, unfamiliar, vampire in his territory. 

What he'd found was a sleeping human, and a cute one at that, who just happened to reek of death. And not like he was a human on death’s door, but like he was a vampire or a ghoul or something that had once been the ground and had decided it wanted to get up and start walking again. Like wet soil, moss, stagnant air, and old blood.    
Death.

But with a pulse and heartbeat and...well, alive. 

Which wasn't possible. Jean had been around the block enough to know that dead was dead, alive was alive, and the undead might have been both but there were also neither. This guy was alive. Which was why he'd taken a curious bite that had, much to his embarrassment, swiftly become more than just a taste for science.

Speaking of. 

“No, I probably took more than I should have already.” At least he felt like he had. He never took more than would render a person a little tired in the morning because that was more than enough to satisfy for a few days. This time, however, he was more than satisfied. He felt like he'd eaten too much even, almost uncomfortably full. 

This was just a weird encounter all around.

“More than...I don't.l understand.” The man's nose wrinkled in thought. “I thought vampires drank everything.”

Jean frowned. Was this guy trying to say he looked like he ate a lot? He may have been hitting the cookies a little hard but it wasn't his fault Historia kept sending them by. What was he supposed to do, let them go stale?

“Do you eat an entire cow at once?” He asked, well aware of how snippy he sounded. Honestly, humans were so rude when it came to other creatures. 

The man started to shake his head. “Well no but-”

“There's no reason to kill a person besides being crazy or greedy, which I'm not.” Jean continued, scowling. “And you should be grateful. Maybe you aren't up on your human anatomy and biology, but draining you would kill you.”

A slow blink and then a look to the side was like being dropped in ice water or punched in the chest. It said everything with a finality words probably wouldn't have matched. His mouth dropped open in shock and the man seemed to shrink, curling in on himself as if he were a child confronted by a monster.

“You thought-”

“You should go.” The man whispered urgently, looking everywhere but at Jean. “No reason to stay if you're done.” 

Jean opened his mouth then shut it; normally he had a comeback for everything but suddenly he couldn't think of a thing to say. He couldn't even believe what was happening. This guy, this strange human, had thought he was going to drain him? And had invited him to do it, fully aware that it was going to kill him? 

He wanted to die? And had wanted to use him to do it? That was...really fucked up. For a moment there anger, a sharp spike of it that made him stand up and step away from the bed, hands curling into fists. He could feel the borrowed blood racing through his veins and the angry flush it allowed to warm his face.

“You wanted me to kill you.”

The human flinched as their eyes darted to the doorway. “I just...I thought that's what you were going to do anyway.” 

What kind of person made assumptions like that? At what point, in his freaked out scramble to get away, had Jean seemed even remotely homicidal? 

“I don't kill people!” Jean snapped. His nails were digging into his palms, threatening to break the skin. “And I'm not going to be someone's method of suicide! Do you really think I want to have someone's death on my hands?” 

Another flinch but no response beyond huddling further into himself. Jean wanted to yell at him more but he looked so small and defeated. When he really took the time to take the human in he could see that he was thin, jutting collarbone, sharp shoulders, and visible ribs, and deathly pale with dark freckles littered over his face and shoulders. The skin under his visible eye was dark, like bruises, and heavy, his lips were cracked and peeling, and the hands now resting on the knees he'd drawn up to his chest had nails bitten to the quick and then further.

“I'm sorry.” Even his voice had become smaller, soft and thick with shame. “I didn't...you should just go. I don't know what I'm doing.”

The anger dried up; it was pretty fucking rude to assume that all vampires went around killing people but he had sort of broken into the guy's room and bitten him and vampire stories did portray them as bloodthirsty fiends. It wasn’t...totally off the wall to think he was like that. He certainly wasn't a saint or anything and it wasn't like some vampires weren't murderous dickheads, even if most were not. 

This human hadn’t known that and the guy was obviously already in a bad way. There was nothing to be gained from yelling and making him feel worse. 

He sighed, pushing air he didn't need out if his lungs. He really should just vo. He'd gotten what he came for (sort of. Actually if anything he was more confused than he'd started.) and there really was no reason to stay. This strange human wasn't his, after all, and it wasn't any of his business, was it? 

And.

Damnit!

“Look...do you want to talk? Or. Something?”

The man’s head popped up and Jean could see the surprise in his eye. “W-what?” 

Jean bit back a sigh as he shrugged helplessly. “I just. Talking is supposed to help people, right?” 

Jean hadn't been all that great at dealing with people's emotions when he'd been human and he was much worse at it now.  Being a vampire kind of skewed one's perceptions of time and life and death and drastically changed priorities. But he still knew when someone was upset and that wanting to die wasn't a good sign. 

Death, real death not just the temporary stop over he'd gone through when he'd turned, was so very final. It was in Jean's opinion, pretty fucking scary. 

“Why?” The human asked. He looked and sounded like the idea of someone wanting to talk to him was the most unbelievable thing he'd ever heard and Jean’s heart ached for him. “You don't even know me.”

True enough and, not to harp on the point, he had snuck in to bite the guy. If the situation was reversed he wasn't sure he'd be in the mood for talking. But here they were and he couldn't just leave someone like this. If he left and something happened he would feel like it was his fault. 

“Doesn't mean we can't talk. Might make it easier.” He’d always found it easier to talk to vampires he didn't really know instead of his maker at least. But that might have had something to do with the nature of how everything had happened. “And I have all the time in the world. Until sun up.”

He preferred not to risk horrific sun caused burns if he could avoid it. It wouldn't kill him or anything but he'd seen the damage it could cause up close and wasn't looking to experience it for himself. Ever.

Lips quirked into a bitter smile. “I don't really have anything to talk about.” 

Jean’s eyebrows went up. “Really? I figured a guy who wanted to kill himself would have all sorts of things to talk about.”

That probably wasn't the right thing to say but it wasn't like he was some expert on this. He'd known exactly one suicidal vampire in all his years and, in the end, Armin had gotten tired of trying to walk in the sunlight and handled what was wrong on his own. With a sword to their maker’s neck and a good old fashioned soul searching road trip, which wasn't a method he was going to suggest to a human.

Well maybe the road trip. 

Dark eyes regarded him blankly for a moment then the man shook his head. “It's not like that. I don't...I almost died. In the ‘accident’ that messed up my eye?” He gestured towards the patch on his face. “But there was a guy in my unit. A witch, I guess is the proper term, and he fixed me.”

Jean was tempted to ask how exactly they were defining fixed these days since there was the whole smelling of death thing. And the oddly good tasting blood. He was willing to go out on a limb and say fixed by witch standards was maybe not as thorough as they thought. 

But he didn't like to get involved with magic. Witches were basically humans, with the same tendency towards seeing monsters as...well, monsters, but with the power to make their fear a problem. Hunters were almost always witches, roaming the night to kill anything non-human just for daring to exist. 

He wasn't a fan. He was a little wary of associating with someone who knew a witch, though it certainly explained the lack of concern about him being a vampire, but he didn’t feel any magic in the air or smell the telltale scent of burnt herbs and ozone that always seemed to follow witches. 

He was pretty sure he was fine. 

“But when I was dying it was so quiet. Peaceful, like falling asleep almost. I couldn't think or move or feel anything and it was...nice.” He looked down at his hands and long lashes brushed over his skin. He looked almost wistful. 

Jean had never heard dying described that way. It seemed like the same experience, the numb paralysis and deafness, but everyone he knew who’d actually (temporarily) died agreed that it had been terrifying and lonely. Even Armin, who'd chased final death, said it had been the worst experience of either of his lives. 

“And now I'm alive and everything is messed up. I can't even leave the house and everything in my head is loud all the time and people don't look at me the same, I’m ruining everything for my parents, and if I have to hear one more person tell me how  _ lucky _ I am to be alive when I'm not really alive, when I can't even sleep without taking a bunch of pills or look at myself in the mirror or breathe, just sit and breathe without being afraid, I will…” His voice was raising with each word and Jean could practically smell the anger and despair in him but it all vanished with a blink. He looked at Jean like he was surprised to see him then shook his head. “I'm sorry. You don't want to hear this shit.”

“I did ask if you wanted to talk.” Jean pointed out. In truth he hadn't been sure what he'd thought would come of that offer but it was what it was. And hearing ‘it’? Well it sounded pretty bad. He couldn't really get his head around what this strange, very damaged, human was saying but he thought he could see where being deaf and numb seemed preferable.

The human nodded haltingly then, eyes turned towards the open window, spoke in the same small voice as before. Without the anger to bolster him it was like he was barely there at all. 

“It isn't that I want to be dead. I’m...tired. I want to rest.” 

Jean looked towards the window and the beams of moonlight streaming into the small room. He felt strange, heavier somehow, and once again he was without words. What was he supposed to say? ‘Sorry?’ ‘That sounds rough?’ He had no idea and yet he felt like something needed to be said to let this human know that they’d been heard. This human who he could feel looking at him now, no doubt waiting for him to say something. 

“The worst part,” The man said, apparently tired of waiting for Jean to answer. “Is that I’m too...weak to do it myself. Guilty, maybe. I don’t want my parents to feel like they missed something or failed. They deserve better than this. Than me, I mean.” 

Jean, personally, didn’t think about his mother much. She’d buried him, in a that strange period between dying and getting back up, and that had been all he could give her as far as clouser went. But it was different; he’d never worried that she would blame herself for his fate. 

It was all very different. 

“Are you really immortal?” The shift in conversation startled him for a moment and then he was eyeing the human skeptically, unsure of where that question would lead or if answering honestly was the right thing to do. 

“Not really.” Is what he settled on. “Beheading kills us. Starvation. Maybe some other things; it’s not the sort of knowledge we go around telling other people or passing along. We can live a long time though.” 

His maker had been old. Not the oldest ever or anything, but working on four hundred and some change, so the oldest Jean had ever met. Levi, his maker’s first childe, was around two hundred now and Armin, the last of them, was four, so none of them were ‘old’ by vampire standards. His maker’s maker, The King, was supposedly over a thousand years old and tooling around underground in Asia or something. 

“How old are you?” 

“80.” Giver or take 25 human years but who counted those? 

The man’s mouth opened and worked, though no words came out, as his eyes widened slightly. Then he ducked his head. “Seems like a long time. You- does it bother you? Maybe living forever?”

Well that was a loaded question if ever there was one, especially coming from a human who didn’t want to be alive to him, a vampire who had a long life ahead of him and was fine with it. He didn’t see much point in the question, doubted very much that his enjoyment of life would impact this man. 

Also it was complicated. Very very complicated. It was yes and no and a bunch of crap in between, none of which could be summed up and explained in one night. Did Jean miss being human? Yes, sometimes. Did he like being a vampire? Yes, most of the time. Was he happy that he’d been killed and turned? No. Would he ever do the same to someone else? No. 

“Do you like pie?” 

“Do I…” The human’s face twisted into something bewildered. “Pie?” 

Jean nodded. “There’s a place about two blocks over that has the best pie. I’m guessing you’ve never been, since it’s hidden with Fairy magic so humans walk past it-”

“Fairy-”

“But it’s great. I was headed over there to see my friend Armin and...anyway. Pie.”

A wide eyed stare was his only response for a long moment; if he still needed to breathe he probably would have been holding his breath. The human looked around his room, hand going up to rub at the back of his neck, like he’d never seen the place before. 

“Pie? What is pie going to do? Is it magic pie?” 

“Not to my knowledge.” He was pretty sure Sasha would have informed him if she was enchanting the food. “But I’m here and you’re here and it's there so why not? I need pie if I’m going to explain to you the incredibly intricate matter of vampires and how we feel about living forever.” 

“I wasn’t aware that was something that called for food.” There was a little mockery to the man’s tone and the downward tilt of his lips. It was, Jean thought, maybe a nice look on him. 

“The menu has a rotation of 260 different types of pie and I’m of the opinion that everyone should try every type.” 

Admittedly some of those pies, about a third, were savory and some of them were technically ‘tarts’ (Jean had no idea what the difference was supposed to be) but they were, for the most part, pretty damn good. 

The man smiled thinly. “Sounds very time consuming.” 

“Maybe.” It would take years with how Sasha rotated things. Especially since 260 was an ever growing number (it had been 255 last year) “But worth it.” 

“Pie.” 

“Pie made by a  _ fairy. _ ” 

Fingers tapped against the mattress and then the man snorted, head dropping forward so his hair fanned over his face. “Sure. Fine. I haven’t left the house in a month but why not get fairy pie with a vampire I tried to get to kill me.”  

He didn’t sound particularly happy but Jean thought he saw a hint of what might have almost been a genuine smile on the man’s lips. Not that smiles meant anything. He’d seen people who killed while smiling and died while smiling and...the world was complicated. 

Pie, however, was simple.    
“Great. We should hurry before Armin...oh. You’ve got a name, right? I can’t introduce you as my dinner. Armin hates that.”  

The man hesitated for a moment then nodded slowly. “Marco.” 

“I’m Jean. Nice to meet you.” 

Nice being a relative sort of term but he felt like maybe, somehow, it could end up as an actually nice thing. There was just something about this sad human who smelled like one of his people. Something he could feel. 

Another pause then, quietly: “Nice to meet you too.” 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Not really a happy ending but I think I'm happy with it.


End file.
